This audio piece is based on the alphabet. The vocal line moves backward and forward from a to z and from z back to a, while increasing and decreasing tempo and seizing opportunities for improvisation. The saxophone alternates between fluid droning lines and swirling clusters of notes. Breath can also be heard on this recording, notably the circular breathing of the saxophone player. I often think of this piece as "blowing air through the holes in letters." -Kaie Kellough

2 Sublingua Composed and performed by Luis El Pana Tovar (cajon, percussion), Tanya Davis (voice), Malcolm Mooney (voice), and Kaie Kellough (voice). Recorded at the Banff Center for the Arts, 2011. Mixed by Tyler Fitzmaurice and mastered by Dimitri Condax.

This previously unreleased piece was part of an improvised session and was approached as a conversation, albeit one that operated outside the alternation of voices that structures polite conversation. The aim was to have the voices explore the sounds that underlie structured language, to rupture the order that is familiar to us, and to sound a yearning for ancestral languages that we no longer speak. The percussive work exists in and extends that rupture and grounds us in a nonverbal utterance. -Kaie Kellough

This piece was part of a cooperative project between Slovenian guitarist Primož Sukič and Colombian composer Juan Camilo Vásquez. It is based on the mathematical hypersurface called hyperbolic paraboloid, which can be defined as a tridimensional surface constructed with straight lines. In that sense, the piece can be taken as a sound sculpture created by a gesture that evolves over time, and includes some modified replications of it produced via live electronics. The guitar is taken, then, as one dimension of a constructed reality, while the replicas could be taken as variations or disturbances of this reality-a product of a curvature in time and space. -Juan Camilo Vásquez -

6 Tatamagouche Composed and performed by Lindsay Dobbin (guitar, degraded tape). Recorded in Dobbin's home studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Memory returned. Its texture unfolds-leaving the house one last time. -Lindsay Dobbin

8 escalator Composed by Katharina Klement. From the series peripheries, a sound portrait of Belgrade. Recorded in a concert presented by Musique & Recherches at Espace Senghor, Brussels, February 11, 2015.

11 Jouska Composed and performed by Ian William Craig (vocals, manipulated Sony TC 377, manipulated Audiotronics cassette deck). Unreleased track from the sessions for his Recital LP Cradle for the Wanting. Recorded, mixed, and engineered by Ian William Craig in Vancouver B.C.

12 "The Last Meeting," scene from Afterword, an opera Composed by George Lewis. Libretto by George Lewis. Performed by Joelle Lamarre (soprano), Gwendolyn Brown (contralto), Julian Terrell Otis (tenor) and Ostravská Banda, conducted by Rolf Gupta. Directed by Sean Griffin. Recorded at the 2015 Ostrava Days festival, Jiří Myron Theatre, Ostrava, Czech Republic, August 28, 2015. Recording used with permission of the Ostrava Center for New Music.

Afterword is a "Bildungsoper," a coming-of-age opera of ideas, positionality, and testament. The libretto for this scene is drawn from an audio recording of the May 1965 meeting that led to the formation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, where young African-American experimentalists debate a complex network of issues around aspiration, aesthetics, identity, representation, authority, race, and self-determination. -George Lewis